from the out-of-the-business dept

Back in October we were surprised to hear that all of the negative publicity over Diebold's badly designed e-voting machines had the company's new exec staff considering whether to get out of the business entirely, and sell off their e-voting unit. It appears that Smartmatic beat them to the punch. The makers of Sequoia Voting Systems (which have received plenty of bad publicity in their own right) have decided to put the unit up for sale, despite acquiring it less than two years ago. In the case of Smartmatic, there was a lot of press coverage over the fact that the company was Venezuelan, even though that seemed to be a lot less of a concern than the fact that their voting machines had a yellow button that would let you switch the machine to manual mode and vote repeatedly. Assuming the unit is sold, it will be interesting to see who buys it and what they do with it. Should Diebold decide to stay in the business, it's not out of the question to see them buying the unit, making them even more dominant than before. Of course, what really needs to be done before anyone goes out and buys such a unit is for the US to figure out why exactly we're using these questionable machines in election after election, despite repeated evidence of both security lapses and glitches.